A Welcome to the "No"-Voters in the Socialist Party

Jean-Luc Mélenchon holds that social democracy is "dead", and that its program has "collapsed".

"What is dead is social democracy itself. The social-democratic program has collapsed, as did state communism in its time." Jean-Luc Mélenchon is more than convinced of this, and it is this observation that, in his opinion, turns the Socialist Party into a "dead star", a "big morose machine", he explained on Saturday on radio France Inter.

Persuaded, he is also, as to the irreversibility of "the decline of the left wing of the PS, in that the votes in this section of the party have fallen to a quarter of their former number in seven years". "It is useless to wait for something to happen", he states, all the while launching a new call "to those in the PS who voted against the European treaties" and to the ecologists, since, he says, "we can constitute a majority for the alternative Left".

The ex-candidate for the presidency expressed himself in this way some hours after the closing of the Socialist congress, to which he had not been invited (he was invited to the congress of the PCF). "It is a sign of sectarianism that does not ennoble one who practices it," he comments.

But, more fundamentally, Jean-Luc Mélenchon judges the attitude of the PS "absurd", "ridiculous", in the sense that the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy would not have been possible without the Front de Gauche. "We stepped into the battle of the second tour [1]. We brought him four million votes, and François Hollande won by a million votes", he recalls. This should have been "a signal" to the head of state, who should thus have been alerted to the fact that "the French society was not as mobilized around him as he believed."

The co-president of the Parti de Gauche regrets that François Hollande didn’t subsequently ask himself about "how to enlarge the base, to permit the people of the Left to unite around a program of the Left".